There was a time when I relished being the youngest in the room. As a millennial, I grew up perusing Sailor Moon fan sites and searching for the answers to life’s big questions on Ask Jeeves. I took pride in being part of a cohort that helped popularize internet lingo like “Facebook friend” and “Twitter follower.” I would face off with older bosses and family members, challenging their outdated ideas about acceptable career paths and social justice issues. I’d tease baby boomers who couldn’t seem to learn how to take screenshots on their phones. 

As I got older, I realized that youth was not something I would always have, but a luxury I was losing my grip on. The year after my thirtieth birthday coincided with the start of a quarter-life crisis. I questioned whether I should be meeting—or striving for—what a friend once called society’s three expectations for people above thirty: home ownership, parenthood and a thriving career. With high housing prices across the country and a rising cost of living, I felt like I couldn’t keep up with what older generations had achieved by my age. So I sought comfort in my generational identity, which would stay with me even as I got older.

While holding on to my millennial membership was comforting, it came at the expense of my relationship with zoomers, those who are part of the cohort after millennials known as Gen Z. I found myself judging the young, which I had always loathed seeing older people do. I ranted with friends of the same age about the ways we had it harder as teens than the generations after us did, because they grew up with a greater awareness of things like safe spaces and mental health. At work, my patience with younger colleagues, including those whom I’d loved mentoring and spending time with, was tested. When they struggled with tasks or asked for help, I associated them with Gen Z stereotypes like short attention spans and a lack of social skills. I dealt with my negative thoughts about aging by judging younger people before they could judge me. 

Social media has only fuelled my ambivalence about getting older. TikTok is a hotbed of generational stereotyping: Gen Z creators, for example, post rants and skits suggesting that millennial managers are the worst, trying too hard to bond with younger colleagues but ultimately turning around and throwing them under the bus. As someone whose day job involves managing people, I became paranoid that I’d be cast in the same light. I overcompensated by taking on more tasks instead of delegating responsibilities to others, contributing to my burnout at work. 

Last year, I became particularly fascinated by the “how old do I look” trend, in which TikTokers post videos of their faces and ask viewers to guess their age. This trend mirrored the viral theory that Gen Z is aging like milk, a sentiment expressed in a flood of posts capturing zoomers’ fears about getting, and looking, older. In one popular TikTok, content creator Taylor Donoghue mentions how a stranger had mistaken her as a thirty-something, despite her being a decade younger. While the aging like milk theory reveals how aging is a shared concern, I became fixated on the fact that younger people felt older than they were. If they felt old, then I must have been ancient.

While this social media discourse might seem harmless and lighthearted, I find it strange to witness. I suddenly feel othered in an online world I once felt so familiar with. Despite coming of age with the internet, millennials are no longer driving digital culture. Gen Z users shape platforms like TikTok and Instagram, often creating and sharing content that pokes fun at generational differences. At worst, highlighting these differences can fuel discrimination, widening the gaps between each cohort and turning us against one another. I wonder if there is a better option than leaning into generational stereotyping, or than trying to do away with generational labels altogether. If we look at the generation gap in a more positive light, we can see how it reveals the ways society has changed as young people have reshaped norms. Embracing these differences, and the shifts they’ve brought about, can help us work across generations to tackle the issues that affect us all. 

The idea of generational identity dates back to the twentieth century, when thinkers like the sociologist Karl Mannheim and the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset argued that people who are born around the same time develop specific values and attitudes. This was attributed to the fact that they live through the same defining milestones, like wars and social unrest. The baby boomers, who were born in the surge of births after the Second World War, are typecast as workaholics who value diligence and sacrifice in their careers. They are thought to have learned these values because they grew up in a time when postwar economic growth made the American dream feel attainable. Boomers’ successors, Gen Xers, are often described as cynical and independent because many of them were latchkey kids who would return to an empty home after school, since their parents were still at work. The following generation, millennials, came of age during the rise of the internet and social media sites like Facebook and Myspace, and are generally thought to prioritize personal identity and self-improvement. Then came zoomers, dubbed the true digital natives, with many of them living the majority of their lives fully connected to the online world. Despite their generational proximity to millennials, zoomers are said to navigate the internet very differently, engaging with memes and cultural references in ways that reflect the fast-paced digital landscape they grew up with.

While generational identity can help us understand the broader circumstances that shape someone’s values and attitudes, it can also sow division. In a 2020 study conducted by John Protzko, an assistant professor of psychological science at Central Connecticut State University, cognitive development experts were asked to predict whether kids had been getting better or worse at delaying gratification over the past fifty years. Eighty-four percent of these experts thought that children had gotten worse or hadn’t changed in this ability. But in the same study, Protzko analyzed fifty years’ worth of data and found that children had in fact been getting better at delaying gratification. He connected the experts’ predictions to the “kids these days” effect, a term for adults’ strong belief that today’s youth are different and worse than the youth of past generations. If even cognitive development experts are swayed by the “kids these days” effect, stopping our negative assumptions about younger people might be more difficult than we think.

Older generations’ biases toward young people can ultimately fuel prejudice, particularly in the context of employment. After I graduated from university in 2013, I bounced from job to job, moving cities for a gig and occasionally working from the morning until past midnight. When I told a family member about my feeling of resignation toward my future, they pointed me to an issue of Time magazine that featured a piece about the millennial experience. Plastered on the cover were the words “ME ME ME” and a young person taking a selfie while splayed on the floor. Confronted with the article’s claims about millennial narcissism, I felt like I would never be able to shake off the negative stereotypes that people attached to my generation, and by extension, to me.

Little did I know, the article and its accusations would crop up throughout my career. In my early twenties, I learned that my older colleagues at the time were upset that I was leaving work at the same time every day, rather than going above and beyond and staying later—even though I was paid by the hour. When I pushed back, my boss, in what seemed like an attempt to ease the tension, jokingly asked if I’d ever “seen that Time piece about kids [my] age.” The implication that I wasn’t pulling my weight at work left me disenchanted. Today, millennials continue to be held responsible for a supposed declining work ethic. They are often associated with the “quiet quitting” trend, where employees limit the time, effort and enthusiasm they put into their jobs as a way to support their mental health and maintain a healthy work-life balance. I wonder why people give our generation flack for rejecting exploitative workplace practices, like excessive overtime and a toxic work culture, while overlooking studies that show how many millennials are paid less than their counterparts of previous generations. It makes sense that we might decide to stop centring work as our main source of fulfillment.

Generational discrimination is an unfortunate reality in many workplaces. A 2017 analysis published in the Psychologist-Manager Journal found that about 60 percent of surveyed Gen Xer and boomer employees described their millennial coworkers negatively and stereotypically. Meanwhile, 28 percent of millennial workers reported facing age-based discrimination from their older peers. Older colleagues’ biases have material consequences for younger employees, who might be assigned to less important projects that offer fewer opportunities for growth, affecting their long-term careers.

The destructive impact of generational stereotyping has fuelled efforts to shift away from this form of labelling altogether. In 2021, University of Maryland sociology professor Philip N. Cohen published an open letter that called on the Pew Research Center, a leading US think tank, to stop using generational labels in their surveys. He argued that the concept of generational identity has no concrete scientific backing, and that it is a moving target, often confused with factors like age and context. The open letter has garnered about 380 signatures, including many from demographers and social scientists. As Cohen wrote in a Washington Post op-ed published in 2021, “throwing everyone together by year of birth often misses all the glorious conflict and complexity in social change.” By focusing on generational differences, we risk overlooking how people’s experiences are shaped by factors like race, gender and immigration status.

Last year, the Pew Research Center announced that it would change its approach to generational research. For improved accuracy, the centre committed to only using generational analysis when there is enough data to compare generations at similar life stages, such as teens today compared to teens of a specific period in the past. It also acknowledged that conventional generational labels can fuel harmful stereotypes and gloss over the nuance in people’s lived experiences. The centre pledged to better control for factors beyond age, and to consider alternatives to generational labels, such as grouping people based on their decade of birth or in relation to important historical events.

Despite the compelling reasons to replace generational labels with other lenses of analysis, I struggle with the idea that we’d be better off. Labelling can lead to harmful stereotypes, but ignoring generational differences entirely can make us ignorant of how culture and attitudes change over time. Given how deeply generational stereotyping is ingrained in our culture, removing these labels may not stop the puns, memes and behaviours that perpetuate biases. We’d still find ways to heighten the divides between the young, the old and everyone in between. 

In a 2022 TEDx Talk, Bobby Duffy, a public policy professor at King’s College London in England, broke down the dangers of generational thinking. He argued that when you’re born does matter socially and culturally, because each generation has different political views. Younger generations often move society forward by changing social norms: for example, Gen Z has helped usher in greater awareness of transgender people and more sensitivity toward cultural differences. What Duffy says we have to ignore is most of the noise that creates culture wars and fake conflict. Consider a 2017 Daily Mail article that dubbed millennials “generation snowflake.” It claimed that millennials are more entitled than their predecessors, demanding trigger warnings for potentially disturbing content and living in their parents’ homes into adulthood. 

Duffy suggests that focusing on generational stereotypes like these takes us away from collectively tackling problems that have impacts across generations. We become more preoccupied with dissecting the personality traits of each group, rather than trying to understand the differences in their circumstances. For instance, one reason why more millennials are staying in their family homes for longer is to cut costs. In the US, baby boomers hold about 52 percent of the country’s wealth, compared to millennials at around 9 percent, according to Statista, a global data platform. As Duffy suggests, one way to push back against the misuse of generational labels is to remember the bigger picture of what we’re all fighting against—issues like the climate and housing crises—and the ways generations have different economic, social and political experiences. While this seems easier said than done, undoing the damage of generational stereotyping can simply start with curiosity.

I think about the meme catchphrase “OK boomer,” which younger generations have used on social media to express frustration toward older people’s traditional views. Some have dubbed the expression an ageist slur. But if we look below the surface, we might find the retort has less to do with bigotry and more to do with concerns that younger generations have about the economy, the climate crisis and conservative values. In a 2018 poll conducted in the US by the survey platform SurveyMonkey and the news outlet Axios, 51 percent of millennials and 42 percent of Gen Xers said the actions that boomers took and the policies they implemented made things worse for their respective generations. While it might be tempting to write off “OK boomer” as a baseless criticism of a whole generation, the expression can provide a window into the woes of younger people and their exasperation toward those who refuse to address urgent social issues. That interpretation recognizes the value of moments like when, in 2019 in the New Zealand Parliament, then-twenty-five-year-old MP Chlöe Swarbrick responded with “OK boomer” after an older male politician interrupted her speech on climate change.

Even the playful-yet-heated social media debates between millennials and zoomers capture deeper cultural rifts. A 2022 analysis of TikTok content conducted by Jacqueline Ryan Vickery, an associate professor of media arts at the University of North Texas, suggested that when Gen Z content creators critique what millennials wear, they are trying to assert themselves in digital spaces. These young creators are attempting to solidify more progressive values in areas like beauty standards and femininity. Take, for instance, Gen Z’s pushback against skinny jeans on social media. In one TikTok, Montreal influencer @momohkd advises viewers to take their skinny jeans and throw them away, burn them or cut them to create something new. I can’t help but connect the purported death of body-hugging pants, which were popular in the 2010s, to the recent rise of baggier, androgynous clothing. Cultural commentators have linked the trend to Gen Z’s greater acceptance of body diversity and fluidity in gender expression. 

Another example is the girlboss archetype, which zoomers have deemed “cheugy,” or something that’s cringey and outdated. I grew up in an era where the girlboss—often portrayed as a young white woman who embraces hustle culture at all costs—was celebrated with Twitter hashtags, designs on coffee mugs and pop culture references. She was seen as a champion of women, toppling the overrepresentation of men in positions of power. As journalist Alex Abad-Santos writes in a 2021 article for Vox, the girlboss narrative seemed to propose that “women advocating for themselves and their worth was, intrinsically, a form of justice.” The more we bought products from celebrated girlbosses like Sophia Amoruso, the founder of women’s fashion retailer Nasty Gal, the closer we would be to achieving gender equity and women’s empowerment.

Even in its golden age, I found the girlboss aesthetic unsettling. I knew that racialized people like me didn’t fit into the confines it created for millennial women. By poking fun at the girlboss ideal with pithy phrases like “gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss,” zoomers have helped transform the archetype from an aspirational image to a relic of hollow 2010s feminism. As younger generations continue to push boundaries and move the cultural conversation forward in ways like this, perhaps it’s time we stopped using patronizing stereotypes to explain their views. 

In a 2021 op-ed for the Guardian, writer Kitty Drake discusses how focusing on the superficial parts of our generational identities allows us to blame our fears and flaws on being a product of our time, and to “bear no responsibility for the more unsavoury aspects of [our] character.” Clinging to millennial stereotypes has not helped me confront the fact that I’m terrified of aging, or even face the reality that I’m getting older. I now realize that I was trying to find favourable stereotypes to apply to myself—like having self-control and being tech-savvy, not tech-addicted—while unfairly labelling younger generations with the opposites. 

Recently, I came across a video that perfectly summed up my change of heart toward younger people. A 2021 post from Canadian TikToker @_traceymoore, who calls herself “your millennial big sis,” proposes that millennial defensiveness when interacting with zoomers has less to do with skinny jeans and more to do with millennials having a hard time confronting aging. Ultimately, she encourages us to accept the process of getting older and no longer being the primary drivers of culture. “It’s okay that we are not the curators of cool,” she says. “I am willing and open to hear what Gen Z has to say.” I, too, am all ears. ⁂

Victoria Chan is a writer based in Toronto. Her work has been featured in the Walrus, Vice and Huck.